University of California, Los Angeles

UCLA has identified, as a critical next step in its Digital Humanities initiative, the creation of an undergraduate curriculum in the emergent field of digital cultural mapping. By integrating Geographic Information Systems into traditional methods of humanistic inquiry, digital cultural mapping uses informatics, spatial modeling, and time-space visualizations to create new tools and methods for investigating cultural, historical and social dynamics. Building on the tradition of a liberal arts education at UCLA, the curriculum will teach students critical reasoning, sound judgment, intellectual openness, and team-based problem solving. Students will learn to utilize, create, and evaluate the tools and technologies related to the geo-temporal web, a global information network in which location and information have merged together and datastreams are organized, processed, and viewed according to the parameters of space and time. The curriculum is unique because it draws faculty from seven different disciplines, bridges the resources of three research and teaching centers at UCLA, and uses new geo-technologies to develop collaborative, project-based approaches to learning with real-world applications.